RSS 2.0Archive for September, 2007
David Gelernter: Defeat at Any Price
Filed under: Appeasement, Democrats, Globalism, Iraq, Pacifism, War on terror
It’s time for Americans to ask some big questions. Do leading Democrats want America to win this war? Have they ever?
Of course not–and not because they are traitors. To leading Democrats such as Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Al Gore and John Edwards, America would be better off if she lost. And this has been true from the start.
To rephrase the question: Why did Harry Reid announce months ago that the war was lost when it wasn’t, and everyone knew it wasn’t? The wish is father to the deed. He was envisioning the world of his dreams.
The Democrats’ embrace of defeat is inspired by no base desire to see Americans killed or American resources wasted. But let’s be honest about it, and invite the Democrats to be honest too.
Appeasement, pacifism, globalism: Those are the Big Three principles of the Democratic left. Each one has been defended by serious people; all are philosophically plausible, or at least arguable. But they are unpopular (especially the first two) with the U.S. public, and so the Democrats rarely make their views plain. We must infer their ideas from their (usually) guarded public statements.
What’s beyond question is that something big went down on Sept. 6. Israeli sources had been telling me for months that their air force was intensively war-gaming attack scenarios against Syria; I assumed this was in anticipation of a second round of fighting with Hezbollah. On the morning of the raid, Israeli combat brigades in the northern Golan Heights went on high alert, reinforced by elite Maglan commando units. Most telling has been Israel’s blanket censorship of the story–unprecedented in the experience of even the most veteran Israeli reporters–which has also been extended to its ordinarily hypertalkative politicians. In a country of open secrets, this is, for once, a closed one.
The censorship helps dispose of at least one theory of the case. According to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Israel’s target was a cache of Iranian weapons destined for Hezbollah. But if that were the case, Israel would have every reason to advertise Damascus’s ongoing violations of Lebanese sovereignty, particularly on the eve of Lebanon’s crucial presidential election. Following the January 2002 Karine-A incident–in which Israeli frogmen intercepted an Iranian weapons shipment bound for Gaza–the government of Ariel Sharon wasted no time inviting reporters to inspect the captured merchandise. Had Orchard had a similar target, with similar results, it’s doubtful the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert–which badly needs to erase the blot of last year’s failed war–could have resisted turning it into a propaganda coup.
Proof of cooperation between Iran and Syria in the proliferation and development of weapons of mass destruction was brought to light Monday in a Jane’s Defence Weekly report that dozens of Iranian engineers and 15 Syrian officers were killed in a July 23 accident in Syria.
According to the report, cited by Channel 10, the joint Syrian-Iranian team was attempting to mount a chemical warhead on a Scud missile when the explosion occurred, spreading lethal chemical agents, including sarin nerve gas.
Reports of the accident were circulated at the time; however, no details were released by the Syrian government, and there were no hints of an Iranian connection.
After 5 long months of waiting, Rush’s Snakes & Arrows tour finally arrived in Montreal.
Some photos and video, shot with my Canon SD 800 IS:
We were in Baghdad, and the sheikh gave me his narrative. There was both candor and evasion in the story he told. Al Qaeda and its Arab jihadists had found sanctuary and support in the Anbar; they had recruited the “criminal elements” and the “lowly,” they had brought zeal and bigotry unknown to the Iraqis. Initially welcomed, they began to impose their own tyranny. They declared haram (impermissible) the normal range of social life. They banned cigarettes, they married the daughters of decent families without the permission of their elders. They violated the great code of decent society by “shedding the blood of travelers on routine voyages.” The prayer leaders of mosques were bullied, then murdered.
Abu Reisha and a small group of like-minded men, he said, came together to challenge al Qaeda. “We fought with our own weapons. I myself fought al Qaeda with my own funds. The Americans were slow to understand our sahwa, our awakening. But they have come around of late. The Americans are innocent; they don’t know Iraq. But all this is in the past, and now the Americans have a wise and able military commander on the scene, and the people of the Anbar have found their way. In the Anbar, they now know that the menace comes from Iran, not from the Americans.”
Is it five or ten or fifteen — years that are necessary to win wars of counterinsurgency such as Iraq? By now, Americans are well acquainted with such warnings that patience — along with political and economic reforms, not just arms — defeats guerrillas.
In these messy fights, Western nations can’t, for both practical and moral reasons, use the full advantages of overwhelming arms against terrorists that hide among civilians. Such conflicts are fought far from home for perceived long-term security interests, rather than the immediate survival of the United States. And when the rising cost in blood and treasure cannot be easily explained, restive voters often give up rather than insist on eventual victory.
Charles Krauthammer: Petraeus’s Success
Filed under: Democrats, Iraq, Military, War on terror
When asked about Shiite militia domination of southern Iraq, Petraeus patiently went through the four provinces, one by one, displaying a degree of knowledge of the local players, terrain, and balance of power that no one in Washington — and few in Iraq — could match.
When Biden thought he had a gotcha — contradictions between Petraeus’s report on Iraqi violence and the less favorable one by the Government Accountability Office — Petraeus calmly pointed out that the GAO had to cut its data-gathering five weeks short to meet reporting requirements to Congress. And since those most recent five weeks had been particularly productive for the coalition, the GAO numbers were not only outdated but misleading.
For all the attempts by Democrats and the antiwar movement to discredit Petraeus, he won the congressional confrontation hands down. He demonstrated enough military progress from his new counterinsurgency strategy to conclude: “I believe we have a realistic chance of achieving our objectives in Iraq.”
September 11 was not the first and won’t be the last terrorist assault on our citizens and culture. And the subsequent factionalism and left/right bickering over the proper course to defeat the jihadists — whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, the courts, at the Hague, or the United Nations — did not originate solely after 9/11.
But the day reminded us that for a near-quarter century prior, only luck and the impotence — not the intent — of radical Muslims had prevented the murder of Americans on such a horrific scale. It re-taught to us, as would surely a second or third such attack, that in war there aren’t really good choices. Instead, once the fighting breaks out, only the bad choices either of incurring casualties and expense to prevent greater such losses to our civilization in the future, or (far worse) of inaction in hopes of searching for reason or decency where they are not to be found, remain.
While the news focus has been on the lowest ice extent since satellite monitoring began in 1979 for the Arctic, the Southern Hemisphere (Antarctica) has quietly set a new record for most ice extent since 1979.
This can be seen on this graphic from this University of Illinois site The Cryosphere Today, which updated snow and ice extent for both hemispheres daily. The Southern Hemispheric areal coverage is the highest in the satellite record, just beating out 1995, 2001, 2005 and 2006. Since 1979, the trend has been up for the total Antarctic ice extent.
This year I marked the anniversary of Sept. 11 by driving through Massachusetts. It wasn’t exactly planned that way, just the way things panned out. So, heading toward Boston, I tuned to Bay State radio talk-show colossus Howie Carr and heard him reading out portions from the official address to the 9/11 commemoration ceremony by Deval Patrick, who is apparently the governor of Massachusetts: 9/11, said Gov. Patrick, “was a mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States.”
“Mean and nasty”? He sounds like an oversensitive waiter complaining that John Kerry’s sent back the aubergine coulisagain. But evidently that’s what passes for tough talk in Massachusetts these days – the shot heard around the world and so forth. Anyway, Gov. Patrick didn’t want to leave the crowd with all that macho cowboy rhetoric ringing in their ears, so he moved on to the nub of his speech: 9/11, he continued, “was also a failure of human beings to understand each other, to learn to love each other.”
I was laughing so much I lost control of the wheel, and the guy in the next lane had to swerve rather dramatically. He flipped me the Universal Symbol of Human Understanding. I certainly understood him, though I’m not sure I could learn to love him.
William Saletan: Rigging a study to make conservatives look stupid
Filed under: Conservatism, Culture, Demagoguery, Liberalism, Politics
The conservative case against this study is easy to make. Sure, we’re fonder of old ways than you are. That’s in our definition. Some of our people are obtuse; so are some of yours. If you studied the rest of us in real life, you’d find that while we second-guess the status quo less than you do, we second-guess putative reforms more than you do, so in terms of complexity, ambiguity, and critical thinking, it’s probably a wash. Also, our standard of “information” is a bit tougher than the blips and fads you fall for. Sometimes, these inclinations lead us astray. But over the long run, they’ve served us and society pretty well. It’s just that you notice all the times we were wrong and ignore all the times we were right.
In fact, that’s exactly what you’ve done in this study: You’ve manufactured a tiny world of letters, half-seconds, and button-pushing, so you can catch us in clear errors and keep out the part of life where our tendencies correct yours. And now you feel great about yourselves. Congratulations. You haven’t told us much about our way of thinking. But you’ve told us a lot about yours.
Ann Coulter: From the halls of Malibu to the shores of Kennedy
Filed under: Democrats, Iraq, Politics, War on terror
But liberals soon began raising yet more pointless quibbles. For most of 2003, they said the war was a failure because we hadn’t captured Saddam Hussein. Then we captured Saddam, and Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean complained that “the capture of Saddam has not made America safer.” (On the other hand, Howard Dean’s failure to be elected president definitely made America safer.)
Next, liberals said the war was a failure because we hadn’t captured Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Then we killed al-Zarqawi and a half-dozen of his aides in an air raid. Then they said the war was a failure because … you get the picture.
The Democrats’ current talking point is that “there can be no military solution in Iraq without a political solution.” But back when we were imposing a political solution, Democrats’ talking point was that there could be no political solution without a military solution.
Monday’s MoveOn.org advertisement, which depicted Gen. Petraeus as a traitor, has been dismissed by Sen. Reid as an inconsequential distraction. But according to the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan research group, the ad reflects the growing distrust of a Democratic Party that may be taking cues from its leadership. Last month 76% of Republicans expressed confidence in the military to give an “accurate picture of the war,” while only 36% of Democrats did.
This explains the collective skepticism surrounding Gen. Petraeus’s comments but does not excuse it. For while the country can thrive as a politically divided nation, its ability to defend itself diminishes alongside faith in the fidelity of the military. The unbalanced portrayal of the conduct of our soldiers has done damage enough. To impugn our warriors’ motives as political is thoroughly corrosive and hurts all Americans.
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks on us that took place on this very day six years ago, several younger commentators proclaimed the birth of an entirely new era in American history. What Dec. 7, 1941, had done to the old isolationism, they announced, Sept. 11, 2001, had done to the Vietnam syndrome. It was politically dead, and the cultural fallout of that war–all the damaging changes wrought by the 1960s and ’70s–would now follow it into the grave.
I could easily understand why they thought so. After all, never in their lives had they witnessed so powerful an explosion of patriotic sentiment–and not only in the expected precincts of the right. In fact, on the left, where not so long ago the American flag had been thought fit only for burning, the sight of it–and it was now on display everywhere–had been driving a few prominent personalities to wrench their unaccustomed arms into something vaguely resembling a salute. One of these personalities, Todd Gitlin, a leading figure in the New Left of the ’60s and now a professor at Columbia, even went so far as to question the inveterately “negative faith in America the ugly” that he and his comrades had tenaciously held onto for the past 40 years and more.
It took political Washington a good six months to catch up to the fact that something significant was happening in Iraq’s Anbar province, where the former-insurgent Sunni tribes switched sides and joined the fight against al-Qaeda. Not surprisingly, Washington has not yet caught up to the next reality: Iraq is being partitioned — and, like everything else in Iraq today, it is happening from the ground up.
Times Online: Hardline takeover of British mosques
Filed under: Islam, Jihad, Londonistan, Muslims, War on terror
Almost half of Britain’s mosques are under the control of a hardline Islamic sect whose leading preacher loathes Western values and has called on Muslims to “shed blood†for Allah, an investigation by The Times has found.
Riyadh ul Haq, who supports armed jihad and preaches contempt for Jews, Christians and Hindus, is in line to become the spiritual leader of the Deobandi sect in Britain. The ultra-conservative movement, which gave birth to the Taleban in Afghanistan, now runs more than 600 of Britain’s 1,350 mosques, according to a police report seen by The Times.
As far as London is concerned, it’s very hard to make the argument that the Islamist threat consists of only a few bad apples. Presumably, these 600+ radical mosques are not empty.
It’s not every day that a book is discredited by the simple act of its publication. But that’s precisely what will happen with the release this week of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, an expanded version of the now-notorious London Review of Books essay by professors-turned-provocateurs John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard‘s Kennedy School of Government.
Jonah Goldberg: Storm of Malpractice - Katrina was a media disaster
Filed under: Katrina, Media, Politics, United States
This hurricane of hurricane retrospectives was no doubt long in the works, as editors like to put stories “in the can†for vacation time. The media seemed to cover every angle, particularly the Bush administration’s missteps in response to the disaster. And while some might quibble with this or that characterization or selection of facts, ultimately the media were doing what they’re supposed to do: hold government accountable.
But there was one thing missing from the coverage of this natural, social, economic, and political disaster: the fact that Katrina represented an unmitigated media disaster as well.
The Passover Seder liturgy contains a pessimistic verse: “In every generation an enemy arises seeking to eradicate the Jewish people.” In the last hundred years, those enemies included the Russian czar, Stalin, Hitler, Gamal Abdul Nasser and more recently, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Reviewing recent publications and utterances by some of the most vocal detractors of Israel and its American supporters, it appears that every generation also sees new critics who arise to assail American support for the Jewish state. Sometimes the criticism is actually anti-Semitic utterances masked by euphemisms (I’m not anti-Semitic, just anti-Zionist). And sometimes the criticism is actually an echo of statements made a generation ago. Indeed, recent anti-Israel essays, claims of ‘Jewish Lobby’ cabals, and accusations that support for Israel runs counter to American national interests are old hat. We’ve heard it before.
NRO’s Andrew C. McCarthy reviews fellow NRO contributor, and Iran scholar, Michael Ledeen’s latest book: The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction.
His latest book, The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction, is released today. It is required reading for anyone — which ought to mean everyone — desirous of understanding the existential threat we face and why its beating heart is Tehran. Ledeen — incumbent of the American Enterprise Institute’s Freedom Chair, Reagan administration adviser on national-security matters, long-time National Review Online contributing editor, peerlessly insightful thinker on the ongoing war, and (in the interest of full disclosure) my good friend — has painstakingly laid out an indictment in two irrefutable counts: the Iranian regime’s unremitting determination to supplant the United States and establish a global Islamic hegemony; and the U.S.’s unremitting determination to deny (indeed, consciously to avoid knowledge of) reality, notwithstanding the mounting evidence … and body count.
